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All We Need Is... Favorite Movie Quote: "Let's do it. Let's go get the sh*t kicked out of us by love." Love Actually is an anomaly. In this age of post-nihilist cynicism, rampant materialism and stimulation addiction here is a movie that simply likes its characters. It's a movie about love which right away makes it un-hip and un-edgy. It sets itself up right in the beginning with its short opening monologue that basically says “there IS love in the world, there is!” For whatever reason I didn't find it off-putting. It felt frank, a lone voice in the wilderness. As an avid consumer of 21st century pop culture I couldn't remember the last time I heard somebody say “you know what, a lot of people DO like each other.” How many times do you hear people say they don't watch the news because it's too depressing? How many times do we collectively get mad at the media for focusing so relentlessly on the negative? How many rock and rap stars do we see glowering threateningly out of the cover of the magazine? The only time you see anyone smile is if they're selling sex instead. Hate, anger, rudeness, darkness, “edginess' is the norm now. It's what everybody does. We see rampant violence in movies all the time and that alone can take a director from talented artist to star. We see rampant sex and cynicism all the time and these qualities alone can give a movie “depth” or an “edge”. I'm all about drama, “grittines', intensity, etc. And I'm as much a stimulation junkie as anyone. But man, sometimes I'm just tired. Here, Richard Curtis, the director and writer, is throwing open his arms and saying “I love Love!” It's corny. It is. But nowadays that is the unconventional road. And it's a Christmas movie, for pete's sake. If you can't be cheesy at Christmas when can you be? There is much that is wrong with the movie: it contains more stories than it can handle -- it loses several, it sometimes feels schmaltzy and contrived, it can be ridiculously cliché, it's messy. But I admit it, I didn't care. I didn't care because I liked the characters, because I was rooting for them to get what they needed. I liked the characters because they were written just well enough for an all-star cast to flesh out. Though I have to say, in a cast that featured Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy among others -- all doing very solid work -- the stand out performance is by a young man named Thomas Sangster, who plays Liam Neeson's stepson. It doesn't hurt that he has all the best lines and best moments (“let's do it -- let's go get the sh*t kicked out of us by love”) -- corn is ever so much more palatable in the hands of children -- but you never catch him acting. He is always unaffected and in the moment. This is good because the confectionery inevitability of his mad dash to tell the girl of his dreams he loves her would stick in the throat otherwise. The other stand out for me was someone else I had never heard of, Martine McCutcheon. She's a sexy and disarming screen presence. The movie is a tapestry of storylines: a prime minister falling for a staff member, a happily married middle aged man involved in a dangerous flirtation with his secretary, a young man falling in love with his best friend's wife, a woman giving up her own happiness for her brother, a young couple meeting as stand-ins on a porn movie. The latter story especially, is genuinely sweet but there are too many. I didn't even list them all. This is not a problem if you can keep them all in the air but Curtis can't quite. He's game and he's almost saved by his marvelous cast but several stories get lost for long stretches, or end suddenly as a punch-line, or don't seem to end at all. But this is a Christmas movie! And a breath of fresh air. I'm always willing to give a little lee-way to an artist or artists swinging for the fence, trying for too much rather than too little. And man, if someone wants to swing for the fence in order to affirm love let that be the reason. I liked the characters in this story. They were nice people. What was the last movie you could say that about? email this review to a friend
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Mar 23, 2008 8:29 AM